It's a natural tradeoff made when we ask for generality and flexibility: Doing that means implicitly saying "I want to do less implementing and more engineering

It's a natural tradeoff made when we ask for generality and flexibility: Doing that means implicitly saying "I want to do less implementing and more engineering" because a complex configurable dependency becomes an object of study in itself, something that needs empirical testing to use at its best. Versus the simple thing you would author yourself: if you know the engineering tradeoffs made at the per-line level you have a decent grasp of the performance and flexibility, but you are implementing it and debugging it.